Media Mentions

An article by Susan Crawford:  The current state of rules for use of facial recognition technology is literally all over the map. Next month, the city council in Portland, Oregon will hold a public meeting about blocking use of the technology by private companies, as well as by the government. San Francisco, Oakland, Calfornia, and Somerville, Massachusetts, already have banned the use of facial recognition technology by city agencies; Seattle’s police stopped using it last year; and Detroit has said facial recognition can be used only in connection with investigation of violent crimes and home invasions (and not in real time). State governments have their own rules too. In October, California joined New Hampshire and Oregon in prohibiting law enforcement from using facial recognition and other biometric tracking technology in body cameras. Illinois passed a law that permits individuals to sue over the collection and use of a range of biometric data, including fingerprints and retinal scans as well as facial recognition technology. Washington and Texas have laws similar to the one in Illinois, but don't allow for private suits. In other words, we’re headed for a major clash.

An article by Jack Goldsmith and Bob Bauer:  Inspector General Michael Horowitz’s report last week told a complex story about extraordinary events related to the investigation of officials in Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign. Its publication predictably ignited a contest between Democrats and Republicans to extract from the 429-page opus what was most serviceable in the construction of competing political “narratives.” But there is something much more important in the Horowitz report than evidence for political vindication. The report shows that serious reforms are vitally needed in how the FBI and the Department of Justice, of which it is a component, open and conduct investigations—especially those related to politicians and political campaigns. The report prompted concerns from both sides of the aisle, suggesting that there’s an opportunity for serious reflection and reform—if Congress and the executive branch can seize it.

Democrats and President Trump have finally found something they agree on — but a powerful Republican may block their dream from coming true. With the House expected to impeach Trump this week, all eyes will turn to the Senate, where the president is set to face a trial in the new year. And both Democrats and the president, for their own reasons, are hoping for a full-blown trial, replete with bombshell testimony that would keep Americans glued to their TV sets. ... “The last thing they want is something that really exposes the details of how Trump abuses his power. They really don’t want to risk that,” said Laurence Tribe, a constitutional law professor at Harvard University who privately advised House Democrats when they drew up the impeachment articles earlier this month.

Americans were gripped when news broke in September that an anonymous intelligence officer had reported concerns to Congress that President Donald Trump seemed to be trying to use the power of his presidency to exchange investigations into his political rivals for U.S. support of Ukraine. The consequences of the whistleblower’s actions have dominated headlines for months, but in many ways, the complaint, which may lead to Trump’s impeachment by the House this month, was a historical moment that was centuries in the making. ...However, critical gaps remained. While the First Amendment could theoretically protect a government employee who wants to voice irritations with something outside of the purview of their job, it would not necessarily protect them if they spoke out about topics related to their work. “The First Amendment rights of public employees — generally, bureaucrats, civil servants and others — are somewhat limited, because the theory is that although they have rights of expression, they don’t automatically have a right to the job that they hold,” says Laurence Tribe, a prominent Constitutional law professor at Harvard. “If there’s somebody in the [Environmental Protection Agency] who decides that climate change is this grave problem, contrary to the views of the current Administration… They could be fired for that.”

In an interview with MSNBC Ari Melber, Constitutional law expert Laurence Tribe said: "If Trump is impeached "it will be the first time that any president who has been impeached is on trial before a Senate of his own party."

Harvard constitutional law professor Laurence Tribe explained Friday why he believes Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell’s (R-Ky.) plan to coordinate with President Donald Trump’s defense team in a Senate impeachment trial may backfire. ...Tribe told MSNBC’s Ari Melber the next day on “The Beat” that it was “disgusting” that McConnell looked like he “is going to conduct this trial as though he’s a member of the defense team.” “You know, it’s an ancient principle — centuries-old, actually over a millennium old — that you can’t be a judge on your own case, and effectively, to allow Donald Trump to call the shots violates that principle,” said the scholar, who has been advising top House Democrats on the impeachment process.

Donald Trump appears to have the full support of Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, leading many to believe that an impeachment trial in the Senate could never result in a conviction. Laurence Tribe, constitutional scholar and author of, ‘To End a Presidency,’ joins Joy Reid to discuss saying, ‘I do think the Democrats should press hard to make this a real trial.’

In recent years, the Northeast region has discussed matching state-driven climate ambitions with ISO-NE's market design. States are working to deploy greater amounts of renewable resources, and a group of U.S. senators from New England wrote ISO-NE about the adoption of renewable energy in the region on Nov. 18. Their letter came after many renewables advocates and states in the region were dismayed to see federal regulators allow a fuel capacity rule go into effect in ISO-NE... "It is not easy to engage on these issues, they're very technical," Ari Peskoe, director of Harvard University's Electricity Law Initiative, told Utility Dive. "A first step is just making people aware of the existence of this organization."

An article by Krista Oehlke '20: The Department of Justice on Oct. 15 proposed a rule that would enable the DNA collection of noncitizens in immigration detention and the transfer of that information into a national criminal database. The rule would affect the more than 40,000 people currently held in immigration detention facilities. Civil rights groups have already warned that the rule may implicate serious privacy concerns and denigrates the civil rights and liberties of the most vulnerable.

One of the biggest divides in the race for the Democratic presidential nomination is whether Donald Trump is a cause or a symptom of the current dysfunction in American politics... Two new books -- "They Don't Represent Us," by Lawrence Lessig, and "The Great Democracy," by Ganesh Sitaraman -- are firmly in the big, structural change camp, making a strong case that there is no normal to go back to. "The crisis in America is not its president," Lessig writes in his opening pages. "Its president is the consequence of a crisis much more fundamental." That crisis is the state of democracy itself. You could fill an entire bookshelf with works about the crisis of democracy in the Trump era, but Lessig, a professor at Harvard Law School, has been eloquently hammering this point longer than most. He isolates the problem with American democracy to one word: "unrepresentativeness." Voter suppression undermines free and fair elections, gerrymandering allows politicians to pick their preferred electorate, the Senate and the Electoral College favor small states and swing states over the rest of the country and the post-Citizens United campaign-finance system gives a tiny handful of billionaires far more clout than the average small donor. "In every dimension, the core principle of a representative democracy has been compromised," he writes. This is by now a familiar critique, but Lessig tells it with skill, citing a plethora of studies and historical examples to make a persuasive case about the unrepresentativeness of America's political institutions. He suggests a wide range of policies to fix this, ranging from practical ideas like universal automatic voter registration and a $100 "democracy coupon" for every voter, to more controversial ones, like scrapping the Electoral College and reducing federal funding for states like Georgia that disenfranchise their voters.

In the future, the medication you take will not only be a matter between you and your doctor. Pills with built-in electronic sensors are already a reality in both Europe and the US, and in the future, they will fill pharmacy shelves. The new electronic pills can collect data, for example, on the state of the stomach and intestines, and this creates new opportunities for diagnosing diseases. The pills can also be used to monitor medication e.g. in patients with mental disorders. In an article published in Nature Electronics, a group of researchers point out that the use of the new electronic pills is not without problems. The researchers, Professor Timo Minssen and Assistant Professor Helen Yu from the Centre for Advanced Studies in Biomedical Innovation Law (CeBIL) at the University of Copenhagen, together with Professor Glenn Cohen and CeBIL’s Research Fellow Sara Gerke from Harvard Law School, point out that the new methods of treatment create both ethical and legal challenges.

Hosted by June Grasso. Guests: Liam Denning, Bloomberg Opinion energy columnist: "Saudi Aramco’s $2 Trillion Dream Isn’t About Oil." Noah Feldman, Harvard Law Professor and Bloomberg Opinion columnist: "We Know What the Framers Thought About Impeachment." Leonid Bershidsky, Bloomberg Opinion columnist: "Facebook Just Can’t Seem to Beat the Russians." Faye Flam, Bloomberg Opinion columnist: "Satellites Are Changing the Night Sky as We Know It." Joe Nocera, Bloomberg Opinion columnist: "Fannie and Freddie Make 30-Year Mortgages Possible."

This week, the House Judiciary Committee announced and approved two articles of impeachment. Why two instead of 10? Why is this process moving so quickly? And why are Democrats prioritizing trade deals the same week as impeachment? Vox’s Jen Kirby answers the key questions on Impeachment, Explained. Noah Feldman is a Harvard Law professor and one of the constitutional scholars who testified at the House Judiciary Committee’s hearing. He joins me to talk about what he saw, what he learned, and the Republican argument that truly scared him.

An op-ed by Noah Feldman: President Donald Trump has signed an executive order aimed at combating anti-Semitism on college campuses. What could possibly be wrong with that? The answer is nothing — provided the directive is applied in a way that doesn’t infringe on the free speech rights of student groups that are critical of Israel. But the way the executive order is written opens the possibility for misuse, and the danger of chilling student speech on campus in a way that doesn’t serve the cause of fighting the scourge of anti-Semitism.

Advocates for students and veterans lauded a record $191 million settlement reached in a case against one of the country’s largest for-profit college chains this week as an important step forward in protecting students, but said the compensation was “a drop in the bucket” compared to the total debt borrowers owe. ... Toby Merrill, the director of the Project on Predatory Student Lending at Harvard Law School, said federal student loans were "by far the largest component of debt created" by for-profit schools. "Unfortunately, because such enforcement actions are directed against the school, they don't directly cancel the loan debt," she said.

Every day, companies like Google remove links to online content in response to court orders, influencing the Internet search results we see. But what happens if bad actors deliberately falsify and submit court documents requesting the removal of content? Research using the Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society’s Lumen database shows the problem is larger than previously understood. ... “From its inception and through its evolution, Lumen has played a foundational role in helping us to understand what’s behind what we see — and don’t see — online,” says Jonathan Zittrain ’95, the Berkman Klein Center’s faculty director, who worked with Wendy Seltzer to get the fledgling project off the ground in 2000.

On Cuomo Prime Time, Constitutional scholar Laurence Tribe, who consulted with the Democrats on drafting the articles of impeachment against President Trump, explains why they did not include bribery and extortion in the articles.

In the days before articles of impeachment were unveiled against President Donald Trump, Wall Street Journal editorial page editor Paul Gigot claimed that a Trump impeachment would be the first of its kind. ..."Every scholar concedes that the presence or absence of a federal crime is beside the point when it comes to constitutional high crimes and misdemeanors," said Harvard law professor Laurence Tribe, co-author of "To End a Presidency: The Power of Impeachment. "

It has often been observed that one of President Trump’s biggest allies in the impeachment battle is Fox News — that if Richard Nixon had enjoyed the benefit of such a powerful purveyor of propaganda, he wouldn’t have been driven from office. ... It’s not. As Laurence Tribe and Joshua Matz write, the framers designated the Senate for impeachment trials to create an “extraordinary court” composed of “the nation’s leading statesmen,” one up to the gravity of weighing “great offenses against the people.” The Senate would not be prone to factional pressure (senators have six-year terms) and would be independent of the president.

When you say someone has “no case,” it is usually meant figuratively, as in “they have a weak legal or factual position.” In the case of President Trump, Senate Republicans are making it clear that he literally has no case, no defense. ... Constitutional scholar Laurence Tribe, who has provided advice to House Democrats, tells me, “In a manner of speaking, perhaps this witness-free drama would be a ‘trial,’ but it wouldn’t be a trial as any ordinary speaker of English would use that word.” He adds, “True, under Nixon v. U.S., the Supreme Court wouldn’t interfere with the Senate’s determination, in its ‘sole power to try’ impeachments, that such an evidence-free proceeding constitutes a ‘trial.’ But reasonable people would surely know better.” He concludes, “The undeniable fact that the Supreme Court would let the Senate get away with such a fake ‘trial’ does not mean that it would actually comply with the genuine sense and basic purpose of the Constitution.”

Constitutional law professor Laurence Tribe discusses the theory of the case against Donald Trump amid the House’s consideration of the articles of impeachment.